We rented our first movie on VHS tape over 40 years ago from a small store in a local shopping center. We opened accounts at the large chains (e.g., Blockbuster, Hollywood Video) and sometimes rented from electronics stores like Best Buy and the defunct Circuit City.
We bought our first DVD player in 1998 and upgraded to Blu-ray in 2007. DVDs shortly made videotape obsolete because of quality and speed--not to mention not having to rewind the tape before returning it--and Netflix' DVD-by-mail soon put the bricks-and-mortar rental stores out of business.
The dwindling demand and the rising costs of shipping and handling physical media made the closure inevitable, freeing Netflix to focus on streaming.
I'm a sentimental person but am not particularly moved by the demise of a business model. DVDs aren't going to disappear. People will still buy them, much like they buy books instead of borrowing them from the library. Nevertheless, the loss of Netflix as a large buyer of DVDs means that some titles won't be profitable to produce, like books that become out of print. And that's something to be sad about.
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